John Preston

This book is the first comprehensive critical study of the work of Paul Feyerabend, one of the foremost twentieth-century philosophers of science. The book traces the evolution of Feyerabend's thought, beginning with his early attempt to graft insights from Wittgenstein's conception of meaning onto Popper's falsificationist philosophy. The key elements of Feyerabend's model of the acquisition of knowledge are identified and critically evaluated. Feyerabend's early work emerges as a continuation of Popper's philosophy of science, rather than as a contribution to the historical approach to science with which he is usually associated. In his more notorious later work, Feyerabend claimed that there was, and should be, no such thing as the scientific method. The roots of Feyerabend's 'epistemological anarchism' are exposed and the weaknesses of his cultural relativism are brought out. Throughout the book, Preston discusses the influence of Feyerabend's thought on contemporary philosophers and traces his stimulating but divided legacy. The book will be of interest to students of philosophy, methodology, and the social sciences.

I challenge Alexander Bird’s contention that the divergence between Kuhn’s views and recent philosophy of science is a matter of Kuhn having taken a wrong turn. Bird is right to remind us of Kuhn’s naturalistic tendencies, but these are not clearly an asset, rather than a liability. Kuhn was right to steer clear of extreme referential conceptions of meaning, since these court an unacceptable semantic scepticism. Although he eschewed the concepts of truth and knowledge as philosophers of science have tended to understand them, this doesn’t mean that, as Bird claims, Kuhn was a sceptic about scientific knowledge. Bird’s claim that recent philosophical naturalism represents a rejection of positivism far more thorough than Kuhn’s is problematic since, from a different perspective, this kind of naturalism can be seen to have inherited some equally important positivistic themes. Finally, it’s not clear that Kuhn should have endorsed a computational approach to the philosophy of science, such as connectionism, since such approaches may be more behaviouristic, and thus unacceptably positivistic, than the original cognitive revolution promised.Author Keywords: Kuhn; Positivism; Verificationism; Truth; Naturalism; Connectionism

Interactions between archaeology and philosophy are traced, from the ‘New Archaeology’s’ use of ideas from logical empiricism, the subsequent loss of confidence in such ideas, the falsificationist alternative, the rise of ‘scientific realism’, and the influence of the ‘new’ philosophies of science of the 1960s on post-processual archaeology. Some recent ideas from philosophy of science are introduced, and that discipline’s recent trajectory, featuring debate between realists and anti-realists, as well as a return to ‘classic’ concerns about explanation, causation, and laws of nature, is described. Many interactions between philosophy of science and archaeology have been based on a misplaced quest for a single ‘off-the-peg’ methodology or other philosophical framework for archaeology. Historical conditions have fostered the damaging idea that archaeologists have to choose between ‘positivism’ and subjectivism. I conclude by suggesting what kinds of contemporary philosophical work might interest archaeologists, and argue that philosophers should recognize the distinctive heterogeneity of archaeology.

In attempting to assess the legacy of Paul Feyerabend's philosophical work, matters are complicated by the fact that there was a change in his basic orientation towards the philosophy of science around the end of the 1960s. Here I shall indicate one aspect of Feyerabend's divided legacy. My main aims are to sketch the principal themes in his (fairly extensive but little-known) 1990s output, to situate that later output insofar as it bears on the realism/antirealism debate, and (rather precipitously, perhaps) to identify what I take to be the single common premise of his entire philosophical work

I summarise certain aspects of Paul Feyerabend’s account of the development of Western rationalism, show the ways in which that account is supposed to run up against an alternative, that of Karl Popper, and then try to give a preliminary comparison of the two. My interest is primarily in whether what Feyerabend called his ‘story’ constitutes a possible history of our epistemic concepts and their trajectory. I express some grave reservations about that story, and about Feyerabend’s framework, finding Popper’s views less problematic here. However, I also suggest that one important aspect of Feyerabend’s material, his treatment of religious belief, can be given an interpretation which makes it tenable, and perhaps preferable to a Popperian approach.